Amid Blockchain Hype, Is There Still a Place for Litecoin? – CoinDesk

Once heralded as the “silver to bitcoin’s gold”, the developers behind the long-running digital currency litecoin are seeking to reestablish the project’s prior position as the world’s second most popular cryptocurrency.

Breaking a long lull in project announcements, litecoin’s core developers and the Litecoin Association, a Texas-based non-profit advocacy group for the technology, revealed a new roadmap earlier this summer. Far from a dramatic change in course, it seeks to reinvigorate a project originally launched as an online payment option meant to be faster and more enticing for global merchants.

But despite early success as a complement to bitcoin for investors and traders, the project has arguably fallen behind as the blockchain technology underlying bitcoin has increasingly become the focus of institutions and former bitcoin startups.

However, the team behind the project used the announcement to double down on its prior market positioning, introducing a number of updates that sought to showcase it is focused on transaction speed, scaling, merchant support and mobile wallets.

With the project unencumbered by the byzantine nature of bitcoin’s mammoth governance structure, some in the community believe it could come to implement changes quicker than the world’s most popular digital currency,